Mirror Game: Welcome to the Future—The 1991 Constitution versus Neoliberalism

Abstract

The paper sets forth a critical perspective regarding the "implementation" of the 1991 Constitution, moving away from legal analysis toward an examination grounded in critical political theory. It situates the context of the constitutional text's emergence in relation to the advance of neoliberal globalization at the beginning of the 1990s. It proposes the existence of an encrypted neoliberal constitution that functions as a structural limitation on the supposedly plural and democratic deployment of the most recent constitution, largely because the capitalist axiomatic was not a central point of discussion in the National Constituent Assembly. This prevented a constitutive moment to create a new social order, resulting instead in the establishment of authoritarian liberalism that reinforces the interests of capital, produces social exclusion, increases social conflictivity, and precipitates democratic decline. The social uprising of April, May, and June 2021 demonstrates how the political Surface (institutional structures) proves incapable of understanding the political substratum (the emergence of new political subjects and new demands), calling into question the democratic character of both the State and the Constitution.